In America, everyone seems to be taking the wonder-drug Adderall - but what
about all those worrying side-effects?

I once went to a barbecue in LA where a group of women in the pool gazebo were swapping recipes – drug recipes. These women were the Nigellas of the prescription drug scene. They knew how to mix their fluoxetine with a nice tasty opioid like hydrocodone. They knew that top-and-tailing their favourite stimulants with a couple of Xanax could produce just the right kind of high. And their recipes had one ingredient in common: Adderall.

Adderall’s the drug of choice in the US – licensed for the treatment of ADHD but misused to treat everything from jet lag and depression to exhaustion and anxiety. It makes you smile like an angel (though you can spot an Adderall smile from the other side of the playground). It’s also – what do you know? – an appetite suppressant, a key factor in the “speed diet” trend in Hollywood and New York high society. Al Gore’s son was arrested for possessing the drug, a well-known actress was said to be taking it before her seizure, and Stephen Elliott’s book, The Adderall Diaries, has been optioned by James Franco for the big screen.

To be honest, I’m finding the whole thing a little worrying. “You should try it,” one New York friend advised, openly popping one halfway through her Subway sandwich. “I can run at a 6.5 incline now, and I swear I wouldn’t have got my promotion without it. But there are side-effects,” she added sagely.

Back at home, I googled the drug to find that these are: depression, sleeping difficulties, nausea, insomnia, a potentially dangerous increase in heart rate, feelings of hostility, suicidal thoughts and nightmares. Other than that, it sounds like a real life-enhancer.

If my husband had fathered a love-child with our housekeeper (it’s not impossible – she’s an attractive woman, and the way she vacuums borders on indecent), I think I’d like to know before a marriage therapist. I’d see that as the bare minimum in terms of respect, really. Because to find out at the same time as some bespectacled, 100-quid-an-hour outsider – well, that might be a little humiliating.

Apparently, Maria Shriver doesn’t share my viewpoint. In his new memoir, Arnold Schwarzenegger says that he was “forced” to come clean about his love-child with his housekeeper, Mildred Baena, by his wife during their couples counselling session. “The minute we sat down,” he writes, “the therapist turned to me and said, 'Maria wanted to come here today and to ask about a child – whether you fathered a child with your housekeeper.’ ”

Now, I’m sure marriage therapy works for some, but this kind of interventionism just reminds me of playing the “invisible sibling” game with my brother, as warring six and eight year olds: “Mum – could you please ask him to pass the Cheerios?”

Only this isn’t about breakfast cereal – this is about copulating with your housekeeper in the guesthouse during Batman and Robin filming breaks. I’m not sure when the right moment to fess up to fathering a love-child is, but I’m guessing that by the time someone with a PhD in psychology is putting the question to you on the couch, it’s probably too late.

----------

Damian Lewis, British? US audiences are still reeling from the Homeland star’s bizarre acceptance speech at the Emmys on Sunday night – and by bizarre I mean made with a British accent. It appears the Eton-educated actor’s performance as US Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody in Obama’s favourite TV drama was so good that nobody realised he was, as he apologetically put it, “one of those pesky Brits”.

Someone should probably let the American public know that Christian Bale, Robert Pattinson and Catherine Zeta-Jones are also British – not that you’d know it from their assumed mid-Atlantic drawls.